>Hi Gang!
>
>Here is a sample JPG of what our app looks like in Vanilla VFP 9 SP2.... compared to a sample provided by Matt Slay earlier... in the lower right of the JPG...
>
>How do you go from the basic Vanilla to the wonderful example provided by Matt ???
>
>Is there some settings in VFP I have overlooked, or does it require the GDI and/or GDI+ ??
>

You can get surprisingly far without needing any kind of fancy controls.

Here are the things I normally look at/change:

- Get rid of Arial as the default font. It looks dated. Switch to something like Segoe UI or Tahoma (Segoe is the more 'modern' font to use)
- Pick a more muted color palette. Devs seem to love strong primary colors but they all compete with one another. You can use a paint program (I like Paint.NET - it's free) and open the color picker. Select your primary color then adjust the saturation way down (maybe somewhere between 20-40). Do the same to get the actual color values for your other colors in your app. Instead of using all primary colors, I usually use a few different shades of 1 main color, then 2 more alternate colors for highlighting (ex. a red and a green).
- Get rid of the battleship grey background. An off-white usually works well. In your example they are using two shades of blue. If you want this same feel what I would do is set the background to the darker of the two colors then create a container that contains the lighter blue color. Drop this on ALL your forms and leave the border.
- Pick a few "styles" for form layouts and don't try to get too creative with color on them. The colors should point out important UI elements.
- Same goes for fonts (I've noticed some devs seem to go overboard with different font styles/sizes/bold/etc). Use the same family of font for most elements (although if you need to point something out, it's OK to bold a font or to use a larger font size). If you need to use a different font face than the primary, you need to pick one that isn't incredibly similar to your primary font.
- Make sure all UI elements are aligned! Nothing makes a form look worse than controls that don't line up. Don't be afraid to make textboxes the same size, even if you don't need the same amount of room for each of them (see the textboxes in your sample as an example).
- I prefer using non-justified tabs. I think justified looks dated at this point.
- Use icons from the same icon family. Too many devs. just do Google searches for icons that sort of fit what they want, ignoring the fact that different icons have different looks/feels/color sets/etc. It's worth the money to buy your icons. I've used the icons from www.iconshock.com
- Add icons to your standard buttons (ex. Save, Cancel, Edit). Be consistent with their position (either left or right of the text).
- Consider replacing the native menu. I've use CommandBars from here: http://www.arg.kirov.ru/ (the site doesn't appear to be up right now though), there is a project in VFPX codeplex that you could use instead.

Hopefully that helps,